Bounty: 50

I have a raspberry pi Zero with a 4 port USB hub attached to it (via pins on the back). The WiFi dongles that I’m using are twin Edimax EW-7811UN models. What I’m trying to use it for is Internet Connection Sharing. Where I connect to an AP with one dongle and route the traffic to the second dongle which acts as an AP. This set-up mostly works though there is one nagging problem. After a short period of time internet connectivity stops. For instance, when my phone is associated with the AP it displays “Connected. No Internet”. The strange part is when I disconnect from the AP and then reconnect the internet connection works again for a short period of time then stops working. This can be done consistently.

I have tried the power saving fix which can sometimes plague these modules by creating a custom .config file as described here I’ve tried running hostapd in -dd mode but there are no significant log entries to note when the connection drops out. The log looks the same as it did when internet connection is present and when it somehow disconnects. I’ve even increased the logging output in the hostadp.conf file to see if that would give me something to work with to no avail. I initially thought this was somehow related to iptables so i installed iptables-persistent but this did not help. I also tried to use a completely different WiFi module from a different manufacturer. This did not help and the problem was still there with identical properties.

I’d really like to figure out why the internet connection goes down after a few minutes but then magically reconnects if I cycle my association to the AP. I’d love to be able to troubleshoot this myself but I have no idea which tools/command line options to use to do so. An out and out answer from someone on how to fix this would , of course, be great too!